THE JOHN BROWN HOUSE IN HISTORY: AN ESSAY
Seated, and largely unnoticed, on a side street in the quiet town of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania
is a small house that played a critical role in the history of our nation. Even with its Pennsylvania historical "blue marker"it
is generally ignored except by small groups of people on special occasions. However, in 1859 it was a boarding house owned
by a widow, Mary Ritner, whose late husband had been sympathetic to the abolitionist cause and who, it was said, had been
a "conductor" on the Underground Railroad.1 That may have been what drew John Brown and several of his accomplices
to stay at the house when Brown was looking for a secure site from which to plan his raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers
Ferry.
Chambersburg, which lies only fifteen miles north of the Mason-Dixon line, was uncertain ground for
those with abolitionist sentiments. In fact, the man who lived beside the Ritner home was a known slave-catcher who made no
secret of his pro-slavery views.2 Consequently, anyone who intended to be effective in the abolitionist cause had
to work in secret. Some time before he made his appearance in Chambersburg, Brown had taken on the appearance made famous
in John Steuart Curry’s painting3 by growing a beard to disguise himself. Those townspeople who encountered
Brown knew him as "Isaac Smith" and his "Secretary of War", John Henrie Kagi, who was responsible for receiving and transshipping
the supplies of weapons they were to use, as "John Henry". "John Henry" made the Ritner house his base of operations. The
fictitious names along with the cover story that they were developing iron mines in Maryland and Virginia allowed them to
travel freely and to receive stocks of weapons labeled as mining implements without raising too much suspicion.4
It was also while staying there that Brown held a secret meeting with Frederick Douglass, one of the
most convincing anti-slavery voices of the time, but Douglass would not join or give his approval to Brown’s efforts.5
Undiscouraged, Brown continued on the path that would lead to his death - and martyrdom in the eyes of the forces of abolition.
After Harpers Ferry it was reported that some in the South saw Chambersburg as the "head-quarters"
of Brown’s band and its citizens as "fanatical ‘abolitionists’ ". A local newspaper vehemently rejected
that charge claiming that, not only were whites ignorant of what had been taking place in their town, but they would have
"nipped the plot in the bud" had they the "least inkling" of it.6 But, in spite of those protestations, Chambersburg
had been the headquarters and Ritner’s boarding house played a major role in creating the event that made it easier
for many more people to imagine the end of the Union.7
SOURCES
1. Virginia Ott Stake, John Brown in Chambersburg (Franklin County Heritage, Inc, 1977), 56
2. Stake, 56
3. John Steuart Curry, The Tragic Prelude, 1937-1942, Kansas State Capitol, Topeka, Kansas.
4. Stake, 27
5. David S. Rynolds, John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil
War, and Seeded Civil Rights (Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 299
6. Civil War-Era Newspapers: Franklin Repository, October 26, 1859, Articles Indexed
by Topic, Franklin County : Politics, Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War, Virginia Center
for Digital History, University of Virginia (http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu:8090/xslt/servlet/ramanujan.XSLTServlet?xml=/vcdh/xml_docs/valley_news/newspaper_catalog.xml&xsl=/vcdh/xml_docs/valley_news/
news_cat.xsl&level=edition&paper=fr&year=1859&month=10&day=26&edition=fr1859/pa.fr.fr.1859.10.26.xml#p1)
7. S. Mintz (2003). The Impending Crisis. Digital History. Retrieved September 5, 2005 from http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/database/
article_display.cfm?HHID=337
